My guess is that something else was up.

Common sense dictates that it doesn't require 3 trooper cars to stop and monitor a person for a seat belt violation. That's especially true given the absurd angles he must have seen you not having it, and it seems like a boatload of extra work to have gone through such hassles on the road to stop you. It's also a petty infraction compared to juicier ones on any given highway such as high speeding, etc.

It sounds to me by your description that you were on a major interstate. Troopers are often looking for many things on those, such as drug trafficking, etc. You mentioned you were driving a truck, one possible profile factor depending on the vehicle.


With profiling, cops routinely find some petty infraction to stop a vehicle, even though they really have another motivation for which they do not have reasonable suspicion to stop the vehicle. As the SCOTUS has held, that is a legal 'fishing' tactic so long as the reason for the stop was something that they could in fact cite as a vehicle code violation.

I see this routinely with drug and drunk driving cases where cops are stopping people for really petty stuff, such as one lightbulb out underneath a registration plate, etc. Everyone knows in the case what these cops are really interested in doing--stopping the car for any legal reason in fishing expeditions to see how many drunk drivers or drug dealers or purchasers can be caught.

It's also no secret that some cops also observe cars and things when stops occur and then claim that any violations they observed at the car stop were things they saw and were reasons they stopped the car. Things like seat belt violations, inspection and registration sticker violations, window tint violations, etc, are common.

Of course, it's illegal for police to fictionalise and/or perjure themselves in order to 'validate' what was in fact an illegal vehicle stop, but the obvious dilemma for defendants is that their word is put up against the cops when court time comes.

The vast majority of judges are biased towards law enforcement's testimony for legitimate and illegitimate reasons, and wind up just being rubber stamps for the cops' testimony as they find the cops' testimony and version of events credible as opposed to the defendants and rule in their favour on all credibility calls accordingly.

Sometimes there are legitimate reasons for judge's bias towards cops on credibility calls (defendants have a personal stake, they may be under the influence, etc). Other times it's illegitimate (judges have a political stake not to call law enforcement agents not credible when on the stand, they are often ex cops or prosecutors, etc). Many times it's a combination of both.

But, overall, the vast majority of cops just rubber stamp the cops' version of events. I've had so many cases where the facts alleged by a cop are so absurd that it only shows illegitimate bias to believe them. Worse, credibility calls are not appealable to a higher court for review, so a rubber stamping judge of absurd cop testimony is sealed from review.

What feels great, though, is where a jury at trial totally finds the opposite of the judge who earlier denied a suppression hearing by 'believing' trumped up absurd testimony and disbelieves the cops's absurdities when recounted or testified at trial.

I find that when juries believe the cop is BSing on things, they are likely to reject them as credible overall. They are like that with defendants and their witnesses too. On the whole, juries are much fairer than judges in a disagreement between defendants and cops as to what actually happened.